DUET: LEAD AND FOLLOW
{Tandem and Mirror}
After a short time away,
beer left to stale in the sun,
the hops now smelling of buttered
popcorn
the remains of a campfire—
that brittle wood, the ashen
faces seen across a flame.
After a short time away,
a home looses its sheen
the comfort left to warp in open window
sun
the remains of a lonesome night in
recycled brown bags, brittle clock
now smelling of tin
after a short time away.
The sprint has slowed
to a honeyed step now resting in a buttered
tin
the momentum of a desire scented
with funereal ash
flames drenched with missing hours.
After a short time away
a home became a resting place,
the sounds melting in clicks of pilot
lights
the ceremony of return
tempering the ferocity
of heels still dug in.
M's work has appeared in and at Artforum, Aperture, the Art Book Review, Entropy, Medium, the Torrance Art Museum, Redcat Theater, Pieter Performance Space, PAM, Coaxial, the Hive, MAMA, Steve Turner, and the Women's Center for Creative Work. M's play, The Shapes We Make With Our Bodies (Plays Inverse, 2015), will be featured in the 2017 BAM Next Wave Festival Reading Room. M is the author of Come Back (&Now, 2018), recipient of the 2016 Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writers Prize. M runs on tangents. M digresses. M is a percipient narrator and, at the same time, understands that no single narrator can be trusted. In M's fairy tale, M is transformed into the text—be it fiction, essay, or play—until M is no longer author, but description.